I've just been ranting on the sandisk forum about this, but expect more help from you guys :-)

My wife just got an 8Gb Fuze, and I've been trying to put music on it. I found that my id3 tags are not always recognised by the player, especially the genre tags. I found that they were being tagged as id3v2.4, so I converted a few albums (using KID3 on Linux) to id3v2.3. I still found that the "Indie" genre still comes up as "Unknown" on the fuze. There may be more but it was getting late so I gave up.

Has anyone else seen this issue? Would anyone be willing to try tagging something as "indie" to see if it works on their fuze? If it is a problem, a list of supported genres would be nice to see, is there one around? If it's just me, then I guess I need to find a new way of converting my tag versions. It really is incredible that we have to go through all this!

Since you're on Linux it's most likely a problem with the encoding. Use id3v2.3 format with ISO encoding. The Clip has problems with the unicode encodings (default for most Linux distros). id3v2.3 ISO always works.

The next FW is supposed to support id3v2.4, but I'm not sure about unicode.

Me Neither. As I said, I converted to id3v2.3. I also switched to ISO.

I have to wait 'til I get home before I can try this, but in the meantime, zickZackMann, you mentioned a bug. Is this a bug in the id3 tags that doesn't change properly, or a bug in the fuze that somehow needs new tags? I really don't look forward to deleting every tag and re-tagging from scratch!

@rlongland: its a bug of the Fuze itself. Some files, that look like they are correctly tagged in programs on the PC, are shown as "unknown artist" or "unknown genre" within the Fuze. Its a mystery to me, why this happens. I use the program MP3tag to tag my files, with this program, you can simply open the files and click "save" and the tags will be rewritten. This solved the problem for me.

Right, I did some playing around last night, and this is where I'm at:

Re-tagging files didn't work. I used all of the linux programs that tag in id3v2.3 that I could find. That's eyeD3, KID3 and EasyTag. I was only working with "Indie" genres, and all of them gave the same result of "Unknown" genre (artist and album are fine). Although at one point, I got "Unknowndie"!!

Here's the interesting part. If I use a custom genre tag, such as "Indie Rock", which isn't on the genre list provided by the programs, it works! So, although the issue isn't fixed, I can work around it.

This looks like it's coming from some incompatibility between the fuze and the Linux id3 libraries. All of the pre-defined genres are associated with a code number, so, for example, if I tag something with "Indie", and look at the tag, eyeD3 says something like:
genre = "Indie (id#131)"
If I tag it as "Indie Rock" it gives me:
genre = "Indie Rock"
This only seems to happen for some genres. Blues and Rock work fine, but Sountrack doesn't either. This must be some difference between linux and windows implementations of id3v2.3, which is a little worrying. I'll have to head off to the linux forums to follow up on this.

In the mean time, I can get around the issue by using non-standard genres, even "Soundtrack." (with a period) might do it. Maybe this will all be irrelevent when they update the firmware :-)

Thank you all for the help. I'll get back to you if I find anything worth mentioning.

I know this is an extremely old thread, but I'm having the same problem and as far as I can tell, it still hasn't been resolved.

I have a lot of strange genre tags on my Fuze. Some random numbers, some single letter genres. These tags all display normally in foobar2000 and mp3tag. Some of the files are id3v2.4, but I tried retagging them as id3v2.3 and it made no difference.

I also upgraded to the latest firmware, but it seems that the only new feature was an ad for SlotRadio.

Has anyone figured this out? I'd really like to have good tag info on my Fuze.

I have a lot of strange genre tags on my Fuze. Some random numbers, some single letter genres. These tags all display normally in foobar2000 and mp3tag. Some of the files are id3v2.4, but I tried retagging them as id3v2.3 and it made no difference.

Sorry, I was completely wrong about this. I retagged all the "problem" tracks as id3v2.3 and it fixed all my genre issues. I must have missed some the first time.